VFR Photographic Scenery: East & South-East England

The Good
I've submitted three of this scenery series to the MOBY database so the parts of this review are pretty generic. I'm going to start this review by saying that I think Microsoft's Flight simulator is an excellent product and that I've had a lot of fun with it. I don't fly a lot but I enjoy the odd flight and it's something I plan to get into more over time.

That said it never really occurred to me that what I was seeing as scenery was anything other than accurate. This is silly really because I have flown before to go on holiday and such like, and whenever I get a chance at the window seat I'm looking down at the world as it passes by. I just never made the connection between a game and the real world. The thing is though this is a game on one level and its a flight simulator on another and as such it should be as accurate as possible.

This is the first volume in this series of scenery add-ons but it is the third that I loaded. I was expecting great things from this volume, after all it had London in it. This enhancement made London look much more realistic, the houses were good red English brick with dark slate roofs and most of those white buildings that dot the landscape were removed which took away the toytown look to the simulation. Surprisingly though the new London didn't impress me much. It was good but it was just rows and rows of houses that didn't mean much to me. It was when I started seeing places like Hyde Park that I could identify that this volume came into its own and I really started to enjoy myself again.

The manual goes into detail about how the default scenery is generated and how it's not especially accurate. This is forgivable because this product was made from some millennium project that produced the first full aerial photographic survey of the U.K. so I guess there wasn't the reference material for MS FS 2002 to draw on. The accuracy is something that I noticed when flying out of London taking screen shots with & without the scenery enabled. Roads, rivers lakes, forests, e.t.c. did all change position and they looked better for it. Rivers are not a standard blue/grey colour, many are naturally a mucky, dirty brown like the Thames and the Humber. Lakes often look black, something I remember from hiking in the Lake District and looking down on Angel Tarn, and this comes over beautifully in this scenery add on.

What really brought home the difference between this scenery and the default scenery was when I started looking for an iconic landmark that would be recognisable from the air. I chose the Humber bridge because I knew it was one of the flight simulator's standard structures. Using photographic scenery it is possible to start with one landmark and follow roads, rivers and other landmarks in order to navigate to a destination. It's what I think VFR, Visual Fight Rules, is all about. By taking off from Humberside airport and using a map in another window I was able to follow roads in the photographic scenery straight to the bridge. However the road didn't actually go to the bridge because the new more accurate roads don't match the where the flight simulator has placed its landmark buildings, airports etc. This is an anomaly that the manual does warn about and in practice I didn't find it to be much of a problem.

The Bad
So this scenery is a great improvement and I love it but it wasn't love at first flight and it didn't immediately blow me away, it does have it's flaws.

The product was designed to be viewed from a slow plane like a Cessna flying above 1500 feet. Anything lower such as the first take-off and, while the scenery still looks more realistic, it looks very grainy. Anything faster and the scenery blurs as the flight simulator tries to keep up with the plane. This was most noticeable when I turned the simulator speed up to eight times normal so that I could get from A to B faster. When I paused the flight to look around I had to wait for the scenery to gradually come into focus before I could take a screen shot.

I also had to tweak the flight simulator settings to get the best out of the scenery and I'm not convinced that I'm done yet. Increasing cache size for example so that the new scenery stretched out to the horizon is one tweak, playing with MIP mapping settings is another. That's fine for me because I enjoy a good tweak but it's not for everyone.

There are also some anomalies that, when they surface, really stand out.

One anomaly is where rivers meet the sea. With the default scenery the standard blue/grey of the river meets the standard grey/green of the sea and there's no noticeable join. I don't recall following any of the rivers in this volume down to the sea but in other two volumes I've loaded the river is a dark brown and that colour ends in a sharp line where the river meets the default seascape.

The Bottom Line
While this volume did not, for me, have the WOW factor that a volume covering my home area did I'm that anyone who lives within its scope will find it an excellent addition.

Since loading this series I find I am flying more often, I look out of the windows a lot more, and flying is a lot more like fun than being a technical exercise. It has changed the way that I fly.